I. Reference to Co-Pending Applications for Patent
The present Application for Patent is related to the following co-pending U.S. patent applications:
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/261,806 entitled “Varied Signaling Channels for a Reverse Link in a Wireless Communication System”, filed Oct. 27, 2005, assigned to the assignee hereof, and expressly incorporated by reference herein; and
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/261,836 entitled “Systems And Methods For Control Channel Signaling”, filed Oct. 27, 2005, assigned to the assignee hereof; and expressly incorporated by reference herein.
U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/731,013 entitled “Mobile Wireless Access System”, filed Oct. 27, 2005, assigned to the assignee hereof, and expressly incorporated by reference herein.
II. Field
The present invention relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for transmitting signaling in a communication system.
III. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, packet data, broadcast, messaging, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication for multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, and frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems.
A communication system may employ a transmission scheme with feedback to improve reliability for data transmission. For example, a transmitter may transmit a data packet to a receiver, which may send back an acknowledgment (ACK) if the packet is decoded correctly or a negative acknowledgment (NAK) if the packet is decoded in error. The transmitter uses the ACK to terminate the transmission of the packet and uses the NAK to retransmit all or a portion of the packet. The transmitter is thus able to transmit just enough data for each packet based on the feedback from the receiver.
A base station in a multiple-access system may concurrently communicate with multiple terminals on the forward and reverse links at any given moment. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. The base station may transmit data to multiple terminals on the forward link and may receive ACKs and/or NAKs (or ACK information) from these terminals on the reverse link. The ACK information from the terminals, although beneficial, represent overhead in the system.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently send ACK information in a communication system.